Long-eared desert bat

Deadly scorpions? Dinner, thinks the desert long-eared bat. From a few metres above ground it drops onto one and tries to bite into its head.

In retaliation, the scorpion stings the bat straight in the face.

The bat's response? Meh, whatever. Seemingly hardly noticing, it carries straight on, kills the scorpion and carries it home to eat at leisure – even if it gets stung by the fearsome Palestine yellow scorpion, which in rare cases can kill humans.

Syringammina fragilissima

In the late summer of 1882, a ship called the Triton cruised the chilly seas north of Scotland and dredged up the first specimen of a new group of organisms, the single-celled xenophyophores.

The species they found, Syringammina fragilissima, is exceptional. Most single-celled organisms are microscopic, but Syringammina regularly grows to a width of 10 centimetres, and sometimes twice that.

It surrounds itself with a crusty structure called a test, which is the largest object made by a single cell.

Cacoxenus indagator

You're walled up in the dark and all your food has gone. You have to escape. But to get out you have to smash your way through a stone wall with your head – without even knowing if you're going in the right direction.

It might sound like a scene dropped from Saw XXIII, but this is how the fly Cacoxenus indagator begins its adult life.

In the same situation humans would struggle, but the fly knows exactly what to do.

Peppermint shrimp

This brightly coloured crustacean has a lifestyle that requires extreme pronunciation skills: it is a protandric simultaneous hermaphrodite.

That means it starts out as a male, but sometimes turns into a hermaphrodite with both male and female sexual organs if mating options seem thin on the ground.

Changing sex is costly, so they would rather not do it. As a result they all play an advanced form of "chicken" called the hermaphrodite's dilemma, in which everyone hopes someone else will change sex first.